The Maximus IV GENE-Z motherboard by Asus takes the ROG motherboard recipe and shrinks it to a micro ATX form factor, in an effort to appeal to speed freaks and case modders alike. The motherboard offers support for both NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFireX but still, the integrated GPU features of the Intel Z68 chipset are wasted. Full support for the Lucid Virtu graphics virtualization engine means the Maximus IV GENE-Z can switch between discrete and integrated graphics on-the-fly as the application demands, while SupremeFX X-Fi 2 audio and Intel Ethernet with GameFirst allow you to build a great gaming rig.

Furthermore, with the addition of Lucid Virtu, you can also take advantage of Intel’s integrated GPU on their 2nd generation Core i7 CPUs for improved video transcoding. The GPU TweakIt feature that’s also on board allows you to adjust the system’s GPU and CPU settings from an external notebook in real-time, should you want to tweak it for that extra boost in performance.

The M4G-Z is also loaded with the new UEFI BIOS, which provides a mouse-enabled graphical BIOS menu for easy adjustment of system settings. An added bonus is the ASUS feature CPU Level-up, which easily upgrades the CPU at no additional cost with a simple click.

GameFirst: The speed you need to pwn
Low Internet latency allows you to frag more, and get fragged less. That's why ROG has introduced GameFirst, a feature that manages the flow of traffic according to your needs so that you can still listen to online music, download and upload files, and engage in Internet chats without sacrificing the low ping times you need to pwn your opponents.

* Hyper DIMM support is subject to the physical characteristics of individual CPUs.
* Due to CPU behavior, DDR3 2200/2000/1800 MHz memory module will run at DDR3 2133/1866/1600 MHz frequency as default.